November 10 in Türkiye: Why Do People Still Stop at 9:05 AM for Atatürk?

For readers in a hurry: At 9:05 on the morning of November 10, sirens sound across Türkiye and many people stop where they are, in classrooms and in traffic, for a minute of silence. That is the minute Mustafa Kemal Atatürk died in 1938. He led the War of Independence after the First World War, when the Treaty of Sèvres proposed the partition of much of the Ottoman Empire among the Allies and their partners, and he founded a republic in which sovereignty belonged to the nation. No law requires anyone to stop. People do it because they remember what that struggle gave them.

If you are visiting Türkiye on the morning of November 10, 9:05 can take you by surprise. At 9:04 the city is going about its day, with traffic moving and shops open. A minute later, sirens begin to sound from every direction. Cars stop in the middle of the road and some drivers step out and stand beside them. People on the sidewalk stop where they are, and for a minute most of the street stands still. Then the sirens fade, and the city goes back to its morning.

What you have just seen is the national moment of silence for Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, held at the minute he died in 1938. In schools and at official ceremonies, the flags are lowered to half-mast and the national anthem, the İstiklal Marşı, follows the silence.

Who Atatürk was and what was at stake

In the autumn of 1918, the Ottoman Empire lost the First World War. Allied warships anchored off Istanbul, and Allied troops took control of ports and railways. In May 1919, a Greek army landed at İzmir. On August 10, 1920, delegates of the Sultan's government signed the Treaty of Sèvres. Its terms placed the Straits under international control and gave Eastern Thrace and the İzmir region to Greek administration. They provided for an Armenian state and a possible Kurdish autonomous region in the east and set aside French and Italian zones of influence in the south. What was left for a Turkish state was a reduced territory in central and northern Anatolia. The Ottoman parliament had been dissolved, and the treaty was never ratified; in Ankara, a new parliament refused to recognize it.

The Treaty of Sèvres (1920) proposed dividing much of the Ottoman Empire. The treaty was never ratified or implemented.

That parliament existed because of a movement Mustafa Kemal had begun a year earlier. He was an Ottoman officer, known since 1915 as a commander at Gallipoli. On May 19, 1919 he landed at Samsun on the Black Sea coast, and with congresses at Erzurum and Sivas he turned scattered local resistance into a national movement (I wrote about that landing and what followed in May 19 in Türkiye: The Beginning of the Republic). The Grand National Assembly opened in Ankara on April 23, 1920, the day Türkiye still marks as National Sovereignty Day (23 Nisan: What Turkey's National Sovereignty and Children's Day Actually Means).

Its constitution of January 1921 stated that sovereignty belongs to the nation without condition. After the Battle of Sakarya in 1921 the Assembly gave him the title Gazi, and in 1922 the War of Independence ended in victory. On November 1, 1922 the Assembly abolished the Ottoman sultanate. The Treaty of Lausanne of July 1923 replaced Sèvres and recognized the new state's borders, and on October 29, 1923 the Assembly proclaimed the Republic and elected him its first president. I told the story of that day in Turkish Republic Day: 29 Ekim Cumhuriyet Bayramı Explained.

The Treaty of Lausanne (1923) established international recognition of the new Turkish state's sovereignty and borders. The map is a simplified illustration.

When I stand in silence on November 10, I think of my own family. My great-grandparents' generation lived through wars that uprooted entire communities. Some of my ancestors fled the Balkans with their families. Women and children endured hunger and displacement while the men went to fight. Some never returned. Those who survived carried memories of loss and hardship into the lives they tried to rebuild.

By the end of the First World War, people had endured years of fighting, poverty and uncertainty. Many had lost their homes or loved ones. They were exhausted, hungry and frightened of what might come next. Atatürk gave people in those circumstances a reason to believe that their future could still belong to them. He brought people together in a struggle for independence and helped establish a republic founded on the sovereignty of its own people.

I think about what that meant to the generations before mine, especially those in my family who lived through it. They had already paid so much for the chance to live in their own country. The republic gave their children and grandchildren a different future.

The fifteen years that followed brought changes that still shape my life today. The caliphate was abolished in 1924. The Civil Code of 1926 established civil marriage and prohibited polygamy. In 1934, Turkish women gained the right to vote and stand in national elections, earlier than women in several European countries, including France and Italy. Some of these reforms grew out of debates and struggles that began during the late Ottoman period, which I explored in Democracy Did Not Begin in 1923.

Today, when I see the tradwife trend on social media, with some women presenting financial dependence and traditional gender roles as an ideal, I think about how differently these questions are understood in Türkiye. Turkish women have different beliefs and ways of living. Some choose traditional family roles, while others pursue careers and independent lives. Yet the rights to education, employment, political participation, and financial independence have become deeply rooted expectations for many women. Generations have worked to secure those rights, and women continue to defend them.

I see that history in my own family. My great-grandmother was a brave woman who survived war and was forced to flee her home. Her daughter, my grandmother, became the first in our family to finish middle school. My mother was the first to graduate from high school, and I became the first to graduate from university. Four generations of women, each able to go a little further than the one before her.

Today, I can have my own bank account, earn my living, vote and raise my voice. These are ordinary parts of my life, yet I know how extraordinary they would have seemed to my great-grandmother, who once had to struggle simply to survive.

When the sirens begin on November 10, I think of her and of the generations who endured war and hardship. I think of the future they hoped their children would have, and of Atatürk's role in making that future possible. For me, standing in silence at 9:05 is a way of remembering what they went through and how much has changed since. I believe that sense of gratitude is one of the reasons millions of us still stop, nearly ninety years after his death.

Why people still stop

More than a century has passed since the War of Independence and nearly nine decades since Atatürk died. Every November 10, people still interrupt their mornings when the sirens begin. Drivers pull over where it is safe and people stand still on sidewalks and in shops. Participation outside official ceremonies is generally voluntary. Some people continue with their day.

Atatürk's legacy has been discussed and interpreted in different ways over the generations. People have different views of his reforms and of certain periods in the Republic's history. Those discussions are part of Türkiye's relationship with its past.

Yet for many, November 10 remains a deeply personal occasion, connected to family memories and a sense of gratitude for the independence their country gained.

For me, the silence at 9:05 carries that gratitude. It connects the lives we have today with the generations who lived through the struggle to make them possible.

The minute he died

Mustafa Kemal Atatürk died at Dolmabahçe Palace in Istanbul on Thursday, November 10, 1938, after an illness of more than a year; his doctors had diagnosed cirrhosis of the liver. The medical board's announcement gave the time in plain Turkish: dokuzu beş geçe, five past nine. The commemoration keeps that exact minute.

His body was taken to Ankara by ship and train. After the state funeral on November 21, he was buried in a temporary tomb at the Ethnography Museum. Fifteen years later, on November 10, 1953, his remains were moved to Anıtkabir, the mausoleum built for him on a hill in the center of Ankara.

How a mourning program became a custom

The first 9:05 silence took place on November 10, 1939, the first anniversary of his death. The program, drawn up by the ruling Republican People's Party, asked people at the ceremonies to stand for five minutes and in Istanbul trams and cars stopped where they were. The historian Hakan Uzun calls that year the "first mourning." Sirens came later; by the 1950s the press describes factory and ship sirens sounding at 9:05.

In 1988 the government ended the official mourning restrictions and cinemas and theaters stayed open on November 10. The silence continued. That day the newspaper Sabah published a PİAR survey in which 89.7 percent of respondents wanted the 9:05 silence to continue. The Turkish Flag Law still requires flags at half-mast on November 10; the silence itself rests on custom.

Schools, streets and Anıtkabir

In schools the ceremony has a fixed order. Students and teachers gather in the courtyard, the flag is lowered to half-mast, the siren starts the silence, and the İstiklal Marşı follows. Students then read poems and short speeches about Atatürk. Some years the mid-term break falls during Atatürk Week, as it did in 2024 and 2025; in those years the Ministry asked schools to hold the commemorative events on the days before.

In Ankara the state ceremony takes place at Anıtkabir. The president, the speaker of parliament, the leaders of the main political parties and the military commanders walk up the Aslanlı Yol, the avenue of stone lions, and lay a wreath at the tomb before the 9:05 silence and the anthem. The president then writes a message in the Anıtkabir special book, the Özel Defter. Through the rest of the day the public files in.

The alphabet you are reading

For anyone learning Turkish, one of Atatürk's reforms is on every page they read. On November 1, 1928, parliament replaced the Arabic script with a 29-letter Latin-based alphabet that gave each of the eight Turkish vowels its own letter (see the Turkish alphabet lesson). In January 1929 the Millet Mektepleri, the Nation's Schools, opened to teach adults the new letters, with the president of the Republic as their chief teacher, which is the origin of his title Başöğretmen, Head Teacher.

In 1932 he supported the founding of the society that became the Türk Dil Kurumu, the Turkish Language Association, which promoted Turkish-derived words such as okul beside the older mektep (more in Turkish Loan Words: Where Everyday Words Really Come From). In his will, written two months before he died, he left part of the income from his İş Bankası shares to that association and to the Turkish Historical Society.

Remembered in more than one way

Atatürk's portrait hangs in classrooms and government offices, and his face is on every Turkish banknote. Law No. 5816, passed in 1951, also protects his memory by making insults against it a criminal offense.

The language people use on November 10 is more intimate than any of this. The verb is anmak, to remember someone aloud: saygıyla anıyoruz, we remember him with respect, or özlemle anıyoruz, we remember him with longing. Many messages that day address him as Atam. The -m at the end is the same possessive Turks use in annem, "my mother," and it turns the founder of a state into someone of one's own.

If you are ever in Türkiye on November 10, I hope you will be somewhere in the city at 9:05. For that minute, you will hear what this small suffix means.

Vocabulary

saygı duruşu – moment of silence (literally "standing of respect")

dokuzu beş geçe – five past nine; the hour takes the accusative case: dokuz-u

anma töreni – commemoration ceremony, from anmak, "to remember, to commemorate"

ölüm yıl dönümü – anniversary of a death; 88. ölüm yıl dönümü in 2026

Bayraklar yarıya indirildi. – The flags were lowered to half-mast.

Atam – "my Ata," the affectionate form used in messages on the day

Ulu Önder – the Great Leader, a formal title for Atatürk

Anıtkabir – his mausoleum in Ankara, from anıt, "monument," and kabir, "grave"

Atatürk Haftası – Atatürk Week, November 10 to 16 in schools

Başöğretmen – Head Teacher, the title from the alphabet campaign

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Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

Q: Is November 10 a public holiday in Türkiye?

A: It is a regular working day, and a school day unless it falls on a weekend or in the mid-term break. On regular school days, the silence is also observed in classrooms.

Q: What should a visitor do at 9:05 on November 10?

A: Stop what you are doing and stand still until the siren ends, usually a minute or two. If you are driving, many drivers stop where it is safe to do so.

Q: Is the moment of silence required by law?

A: The law requires the flag to be lowered to half-mast on November 10 (Turkish Flag Law, 1983, Article 4). The 9:05 silence is a custom that began with the first anniversary ceremonies in 1939 and is kept through school and official ceremonies and by individual choice.

Q: Why do some people get out of their cars during the sirens?

A: Standing is the posture of a saygı duruşu, and a driver who wants to take part fully gets out and stands beside the car for the minute. Others stop and stay seated. Both are personal choices; no rule asks drivers to leave their vehicles.

Q: Why does Atatürk remain so significant in Türkiye?

A: He led the War of Independence that kept Anatolia from the partition set out in the Treaty of Sèvres, and he helped replace the rule of the Ottoman dynasty with a republic based on national sovereignty. Many people in Türkiye see their independence and their citizenship as his legacy. Views of his reforms differ, and the 9:05 silence has continued by public choice since official mourning ended in 1988.

Q: What should I do as a tourist in Türkiye at 9:05 on November 10?

A: Stop what you are doing and stand quietly until the sirens end, usually after a minute or two. If you are driving, stop only where it is safe. Nobody expects visitors to know the custom, but standing still with the people around you is the respectful response. Afterward the day goes on as usual.

Sources

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